Attempts to come up with a universal script (orthography, “alphabet”) capable of being applied to a large number of languages have been made from time immemorial, or at least for several thousand years. These include highly scientific and systematically organized ones, such as the Braahmi, originating in India possibly in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. or earlier, and the Haangul, originating in Korea in the 15th century. They also include more or less “ad-hoc”, “build-as-you-go” ones, such as the several Semitic scripts, the Greek script originating from the Semitic scripts, our own Roman script emanating from the Greek script and used in this patent specification, and the script of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) based in London, England.
Examples of attempts within the last approximately 2000 years include the following: Phagspa (Mongolia), various Modi's (India), Japanese, Pahawh (S.E. Asia), Varang Kshiti, Sorang Sampeng, Ol Ciki (all India); scripts developed from the 16th through the 19th centuries by John Hart, Robert Robinson, John Wilkins, Richard Mulcaster, Charles Butler, William Holder, Thomas Smith, August Meigret, Timothy Bright, John Willis, Thomas Shelton/Samuel Pepys William Mason, Samuel Taylor, and Franz Gabelsberger; shorthand and scripts of Sir Isaac Pitman, Andrew Graham and John Gregg; alphabets/scripts of Alexander Ellis, Andrew Graham, George D. Watt (Deseret Alphabet), C. R. Lepsius, Alexander Melville Bell (father of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, a script called “Visible Speech”), Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen, Janvrin, Charles A. Story, Harry Johnston, Robert L. Owen (U.S. Senator from Oklahoma), Kenneth Pike; scripts for native North and South American languages, including for Cherokee (by Sequoia), Cree/Ojibwe, Inuit (one called Inuktitut and another Uyaqoq), Chippewa; for African languages, including for Vai (by Liberian M. D. Bukele), various West African languages (called N'ko, by Guinean S. Kante); scripts called Unifon (by John R. Malone), Shavian (by Ronald Kingsley, for George Bernard Shaw), Columbian (by James Ewing), Abulhaab (an improved Arabic, by Saad D. Abulhab), J. O. Fraser (for Chinese and other tone languages), S. Pollard (for Hmong and related languages), Tengwar (by J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit); newer scripts/alphabets created by LeGuin, A. J. Bloquerst, Josiah Wilbur Arthur, Greenaway, Raymond Weeks, William Makepeace Thackeray. The scripts developed in these examples all fall within one or more classifications of scripts generally accepted in the current linguistics and phonetics literature, such as alphabet, ideographic/logographic, logophonetic, abugida, abjad, syllabic and featural.
Other examples include the following patents: U.S. Pat. No. 6,704,116 B1 (Mar. 9, 2004, Saad D. Abulhaab); U.S. Pat. No. 5,953,692 (Sep. 14, 1999, Steven H. Siegel); U.S. Pat. No. 5,488,363 (Jan. 30, 1996, Jingmin Peng); U.S. Pat. No. 5,137,383 (Aug. 11, 1992, Kam-Fu Wong); U.S. D327,499 (Jun. 30, 1992, Sarah Lemon); U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,577 (Nov. 10, 1981, Milisande L. Marryman); U.S. Pat. No. 4,193,212 (Mar. 18, 1980, Hassan A. Al-Kufaishi).
One of the greatest difficulties in arriving at a single, universal script capable of transcribing all the world's languages is the phonemic idiosyncrasy of languages. This concept of phonemic idiosyncrasy can be briefly defined as the existence of very different sets (usually, pairs) of phones (a phone is any sound relevant to language). A phoneme is a group of slightly or very different sounds that speakers of the language or dialect deem to have the same linguistic function; a very basic test for whether two different phones belong to the same phoneme in a language is whether substitution of one by the other in a word changes the meaning of the word. Allophones are phones that belong to the same phoneme. Phonemic idiosyncrasy is best illustrated with examples.
As one example, the unvoiced and voiced bilabial stops, [p] and [b] are allophones of the same phoneme in many Chinese languages, whereas they are of course different phonemes in most Indo-European languages including English; that is to say, in a language such as Mandarin, it does not make a difference whether one says Beijing or Peltin—the meaning understood is the same. As another example, the bilabial stop [p] and its aspirated counterpart, [ph] (as in Lapham, but also as in put), are allophones of the same phoneme, /p/, in English, whereas they are distinct phonemes in Hindi/Urdu: For in Hindi/Urdu, substitution of one for the other changes the meaning of a word, e.g. pal (“an instant, a moment”) vs. phal (“fruit”). This aspirated/unaspirated phonemic opposition exists in all North Indian languages.
Other examples of peculiar allophones found in some languages include [x] and [r], two radically different phones of modern French and German (the first is a velar or sometimes uvular fricative and the second an alveolar tap or trill or semivowel). These are part of the same phoneme in French and German, i.e. substitution of one for the other does not change the meaning of a word. Even other examples include the [v]/[w] and [f]/ph] phone pairs of Hindi/Urdu, which are freely interchanged and have the same phonemic value, although they are obviously very different phones (the [v] and [f] being labiodental fricatives, whilst the [w] is a bilabial semivowel and the [ph] is an aspirated bilabial stop).
This conception of phonemic idiosyncrasy also encompasses cases where a particular phone is entirely missing from a language, e.g. the [p] in standard Arabic or the [l] in standard Japanese; in these cases the missing phone is always mistaken for one and only one other particular phone, here [b] in Arabic and [r] in Japanese.
The aforementioned examples are by no means comprehensive or complete and are only cited to illustrate the problems in arriving at a single universal script that expresses phonemic information, in the form of phonemic idiosyncrasies, of particular languages or language families. To the best of current knowledge, no past or present script in any part of the world addresses phonemic idiosyncrasy. None of the examples of scripts cited above has taken phonemic idiosyncrasy into consideration or have even recognized phonemic idiosyncrasy as an issue.
The problems that phonemic idiosyncrasy presents when attempting to transcribe different languages (i.e., to convey phonemic information) in a single, universal script, are then easy to visualize. For example, an English speaker, when reading Hindi/Urdu in the universal script, should be able to immediately comprehend that the phone [v] (as in very) can also be pronounced as a [w] (as in wit), with no effect on word meaning. That is to say, the very different sounds [v] and [w] are components of the same phoneme in Hindi/Urdu. Similarly, a Hindi/Urdu speaker should immediately be able to comprehend, when reading English in the same script, that [p] (as in spy) and [ph] (as in put) have the same value in English. Similarly, an English speaker, when reading Arabic in the same universal script, should immediately be able to understand that [p] and [b] are not separate phonemes in Arabic, and such bilabial sounds are usually, but not always, pronounced as [b]; in effect, the sound [p] does not exist in standard Arabic. These problems affect the real world quite dramatically. For example, one of the greatest difficulties in arriving at a single script for Indian languages, which currently have more than 10 distinct scripts, is being able to accommodate the phonemic idiosyncrasy of South Indian vs. North Indian languages: In the former, the aspirated and unaspirated plosives are part of the same phoneme, whereas in the latter, they are very distinct phonemes.